The Diva's Mouth: Body, Voice, and Prima Donna Politics

As a response to The Queen's Throat, Wayne Koestenbaum's self-obsessed look at why gay men like opera, this book by two lesbian English professors--Pope at Georgetown University and Leonardi at the University of Maryland, College Park--shows that even if sisterhood is powerful, it can also be trivial. No matter how sympathetic a reader is to lesbian-feminist aspirations, this remains self-indulgent, chock-full of boisterous, not very funny girl's-school humor. The authors discuss divas in fiction, in the opera world and in pop music, informing us, apropos of the soprano Kiri Te Kanawa, ""we'd sleep with her if we could,"" and that they enjoy cooking with olive oil and porcino mushrooms--jolly but not terribly helpful information. They are irate when another of their favorite singers, Cecilia Bartoli, states in an interview that she is romantically interested in men, and they unconvincingly compare the rock star Annie Lennox to P.T. Barnum's soprano Jenny Lind. Even Lorena Bobbitt is mentioned, although it is not clear if the knife-wielding housewife is presented as one of the divas in this messy book whose most valuable section is a brief chapter involving the novelist Willa Cather. They write that their book's topic has ""overwhelmed and eluded"" them. It's likely to elude the reader as well. (Dec.)